“Connect the dots. Pay attention. Follow the money.” — Me

It was some years ago that I wrote a column advocating later school starting times for teen-agers who attend high school and middle school.

Though many education experts agree it’s a good idea and it might result in improved education, nothing has been done in a society getting more and more famous all the time for doing nothing to solve problems.

Now comes an interesting op-ed article in Education Week, with the headline, “Teens need to start school later. No excuses.”

Elizabeth Heubeck, the author, opined, “Chronic sleep deprivation is bad for teens. It’s been linked to a number of physical and mental health risks, lowered academic performance, and overall poorer quality of life. And while plenty of factors contribute to teens’ insufficient sleep, researchers have pinpointed early school start times as a key, and modifiable, contributor to the problem. But despite the well-documented and publicized research in favor of later school start times for adolescents and teens, countless districts resist the change—often citing barriers such as existing bus and sports schedules and before- and after-school daycare disruptions for younger students.”

The heart of my argument years ago was that children between the ages of 4 and 10 tend to be wide awake very early in the morning and seem much better prepared to face the classroom day early. Yet they are the last to have to get on the school bus and start school as late as 9 or 9:30 a.m.

Teens customarily are saddled with school start times of 7:30 a.m. or even earlier. In so many cases they act like zombies wandering the halls and landing in classrooms. Some even fall asleep in the middle of instruction time.

Though this problem is acknowledged by teachers, administrators, parents and many others, the outdated system is permitted to go on without changes. If I were dictator for life, I would switch school start times — sending the little ones to school at 7:30 a.m. and waiting until 9 a.m. for high schoolers and middle schools.

I can already hear the naysayers. They’ll say it’s too dangerous for very young kids to walk streets to school in the dark of winter mornings. And then there’s the problem of day care for the youngest children, which exists under the current system anyway.

The the real culprit here is sports, that part of our lives where we really worship. We can’t mess with athletic schedules for practices and games and with the busing schedules for teams and players.

This resistance to change, it seems to me, validates social critic Chris Hedges’ title of one of his books — “The triumph of spectacle, the death of literacy.”

Many historians interpret the fall of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago to be the result of the unwashed masses paying more attention to “Bread and Circuses” instead of taking care of more important business.

Perhaps we Americans are falling into the same trap. We collectively seem to spend a lot of time as spectators for sporting events, much more than meeting necessary tasks, and even more important — paying attention to what local and regional government is doing.

And the media will give us plenty of information about celebrities, entertainment and sports figures. Give the people what they want, after all.

As WOOD-TV sports director Jack Doles says on his in-house ads, nothing can get 2,000 people to show up in one place in one night. “Sports does.”